What’s Going to Happen?

(Playing the Pundit)

If I come back in another life, I’d like to be either a golden retriever or a pundit.

It’d be great to be a golden retriever, because everyone loves a golden retriever, and even as dogs go, they seem exceptionally happy-go-lucky.

The great thing about being a pundit is that you get to make predictions that are consistently wrong, sometimes in significant ways. Politics and sports seem to have the highest tolerance for bad punditry, but you can find someone willing to predict the future on just about any subject you care to name.

For this experience, you are going to join their ranks and attempt to predict the future, though rather than plucking your prediction out of thin air, you’re going to undergo a rigorous process of research and inductive reasoning.

Even if your prediction turns out to be wrong, no one will be able to accuse you of not being thoughtful about it.

AUDIENCE

Your audience is curious, engaged, knowledgeable about the world, but also looking to you to demonstrate thoughtfulness and expertise. They want their thinking challenged in order to help them more deeply consider the issue you’ve decided to weigh in on.

PROCESS

1. Identify the subject area.

If you’re going to present yourself as an expert, it’s best to start by surveying the landscape where you have existing expertise. This not need be academic or credentialed expertise. It could be rooted in a passion or hobby. List anything you know something about. In my case, that list would include things like education, contemporary writers and publishing, and the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team. I used to know more stuff, but as you age your areas of expertise tend to shrink in terms of number but increase in terms of depth.

2. Dig into the subject area.

Ultimately, you’re looking to make a specific prediction concerning a single topic. This isn’t a shotgun approach but an attempt to hit a bull’s-eye with one shot. The initial prediction may be a gut-level guess, but your gut is likely to be more informed by reason and evidence than you know. Later you can go back and figure out where your gut instinct is coming from.

If I think about books and publishing, I realize that years ago when the Kindle first arrived and people were making predictions about digital reading ultimately taking over for printed books entirely, I was a skeptic. I believed (and still do) that the experience of reading on a screen is different from that of reading a physical book, and thus far I’m looking pretty prescient. Sales of physical books are actually going up a bit, while digital sales are relatively flat.

My biggest prediction and worry for education is that the increasing cost of tuition combined with declining public support for state institutions, community colleges, and universities will ultimately make the choice to pursue a college education an economically dubious proposition for those who aren’t already wealthy enough (or fortunate enough) to pay without needing loans.

Either of these areas would be sufficient for me to move to the next step. You don’t need to get locked into a single idea, even at this stage, and having different possible paths may pay off later if additional work reveals one path isn’t as promising as you thought.

3. Research.

Your gut has told you one thing. Go looking around for evidence that either confirms or disproves your gut.

For my education topic, I could find data on the percentage of people going to college, the rate of tuition increase, how much college costs relative to other eras, the percentage of students who graduate with student-loan debt and the size of the average debt. I may find information that complicates my initial belief. For example, while it’s true that college has become consistently more expensive and more and more students take on debt, as of this moment it appears to still be an economically sound decision provided you graduate.

At this stage, I’m trying to become as knowledgeable about my topic as possible. This often involves hopping from source to source, as one source will likely refer to others worth checking out.

You’ll also want to be concerned if every source agrees with you. If you’re having a hard time finding complicating information, change your search terms to approach the subject at a different angle.

4. Plan your case.

Here’s where you consider your audience and their questions. They might care about some or all of the following:

What’s going to happen?

Why do you say it’s going to happen?

Who cares if it happens? Who is affected if it happens?

What are the big-picture implications if this prediction happens?

Should I be worried or excited, or some mix of both, about this happening?

Depending on your topic, the audience may care about other things as well. You should list any questions or concerns your audience may have.

5. Draft your prediction.

At some point, you should probably answer all of your audience’s questions, but the order in which you answer them and how you go about answering them could vary widely. Read some works by others that contain predictions, to see how they start off, build their case, and then conclude.

For sure, you want to be conscious of providing evidence that will allow your audience to understand where you’re coming from. Illustrating that evidence in a way that achieves maximum “information relevance” is advisable.

For example, one claim I would make about the increasing burden of college costs is that it is much more difficult to pay your way through college than ever before. When I was a student at the University of Illinois (1988–92), you could pay annual tuition with around five weeks of minimum-wage work in Illinois. As of 2017, paying a year’s tuition at U of I would take approximately forty-eight weeks of minimum-wage work in Illinois.

By showing that tuition is not only more expensive but also more difficult to cover using routes that were previously possible, I help give that particular evidence increased relevance. It’s not just the numbers but what the numbers mean in a real-world context.

6. Test your prediction.

Have a test audience read your prediction, and then ask them, on a scale of one to ten—where one means they think what you’ve predicted is about as likely to happen as a cow sprouting wings and developing the ability to jump over the moon, and ten means if they could bet on what you’ve predicted, they’d put every last penny they own on it—how likely they think your prediction is to come true.

After that, you’ll want to know which evidence they found most and least persuasive, as well as any evidence they thought was confusing or irrelevant.

Finally, ask if they have any questions you haven’t answered that may be relevant to your prediction.

7. Revise, edit, polish, title.

As always, your credibility rests on the overall quality of your presentation.

REFLECT

How well did your gut reflect your final opinion about your prediction? If it was ultimately pretty true to the evidence, why do you think this was? If it was otherwise, what were you missing?

One of the weaknesses of punditry is the extent to which pundits rely on patterns of the past to predict the future. For sure, “history repeats itself” is a cliché because it holds some truth, but history doesn’t repeat itself in identical ways, even when we see similar patterns. Good predictions require an ability to see when something has sufficiently deviated from previous patterns, creating a kind of new reality. Political and sports prognosticators are so often wrong because they almost exclusively try to fit the present to the past—this is how polling predictions work—but really good and exciting thinkers are able to see past the past, if you will.

How can you help yourself see past the past in areas where you’re passionate and engaged?

REMIX

Take your big prediction, separate it from the evidence, throw it into the social media stream, and see what happens. How do people react? What can we learn about predictions and people based on how they react?

How persuasive is your prediction once stripped of its evidence?

WHY PROOFREADING IS SO DIFFICULT

At first glance, one often doesn’t see errors because the brain takes in the gist (especially with clichés) and thinks it saw “busy as a beaver” rather than “busy as a a beaver,” because “busy as a a beaver” doesn’t make any sense, so why would someone type such a thing?

This problem is related to a concept known as “perceptual set,” which means what we expect to see sometimes influences what we actually see. This is especially true in reviewing our own writing because our brains know what we meant to say, so we often think we’ve said it, even though there may be a gap between our intentions and reality.

For example, the first time I typed the previous sentence I substituted “their” for “there.” That error has nothing to do with my knowledge of proper word usage in the English language. I know when it’s proper to use “their,” “there,” or “they’re,” but when I’m drafting, particularly when the ideas are flowing, my brain automatically defaults to “their.”

Over time I’ve learned to double-check this particular tendency when I need to present a polished product. Becoming aware of the mistakes you often make can be helpful in improving your proofreading skills.

Here are some other recommendations for proofing and polishing your writing:

1. Know when it’s time to start polishing.

While you’re drafting and revising, it’s sensible to fix any mistakes you can see, but the thinking required for creating ideas and the thinking required for polishing language are different. The first full draft of this manuscript I turn into my editor will be riddled with mistakes of grammar, syntax, even spelling, because I will still have much revising to do based on her feedback.

When building a house, you don’t stop and sweep up the sawdust every time you cut a single board. It’s a balance: you don’t want the work site to be such a mess that you can’t keep building, but nobody is going to move in while construction is under way.

2. Get help.

One of the best parts about having a publisher is that they employ professionals who are highly trained at copyediting and proofreading and whose job it is to flag my mistakes so I can correct them. I try to give the copyeditor as clean a product as possible, but they have experience and expertise I lack. The shame I feel when seeing all the errors caught by the copyeditor is deep but completely worth it.

But even nonexpert eyes can be helpful in finding the kinds of obvious errors we miss in our own work because of the problems of perceptual set.

3. Read your own work out loud to yourself.

This is an easy way to catch the kinds of errors that will irk the reader. It forces you to slow down and consider each word in ways that never happen when reading regularly, particularly when reading on a screen.

If you really want to get down to the sentence level, read what you’ve written from the bottom up, starting with the last sentence. This will completely short-circuit the part of your brain that is preoccupied with meaning and focus you at the sentence level. Only do this once you’re really convinced your ideas and structure are in place.

4. Be aware of your limits and forgive yourself for your humanity.

Even with expert help, this book will be published with mistakes. I have yet to read a book that doesn’t have any mistakes. It is immensely frustrating to open something you worked on so hard and find a mistake, but it is also inevitable.

This is not a free pass to turn in unpolished work because you can’t expect perfection. One of the key skills and habits of mind in the writer’s practice is recognizing the gap between “good enough” and “can’t make it better.” Paying attention to the proofreading and polishing part of the process is how this can be learned.